Tradition Vs Innovation – Story of an Ancient War
If you notice, you may observe that most of our nonintellectual discussions and conflicts are wars between tradition and innovation. Here you may find a person trying to convince others that one should stick with the legacies: experienced, practices, and patterns – not necessarily using the spoken words, but some contextual jargon; while the other person is contradicting. If only innovation and creativity can make a difference. Or in other words, you learn as you go. The same quarrel exists in our software engineering field, at least in our local industry as I see.
1. The Fundamentalist Craftsmen or Blind Followers
There are people who have strong belief in old practices. They always have the same number of documents, same life-cycle, identical design, and unbelievably a single strategy for every project. The most surprising point for me is that even the failure is unable to make them believe that there’s something wrong. Instead of trying to make some improvements and searching for the shortcoming in their practices and strategy, they start believing that failure is a norm, or it’s not failure at all. For instance, you’ll hear them saying “Clients never get satisfied” or “Losing deadlines is a norm in our industry”.
Examples -make things easier
In a software project, the offshore back-office development team shares the documents reside in their local repository with the the on-site front-office team to let them update the documents. In absence of their access on offline documents the local team shares the documents via email with the remote team. Obviously they get frequent version conflicts in documents and when it happens, they arrange a meeting and manually resolve the conflicts in the documents. For months, they suffer with this problem but avoid change in their practice e.g. having an online document repository instead of shareing the documents on email. The term coined here is Brute Force approach as Steve McConnell called it
2. The Innovator – or scientist, we can say
Away from the above category, the innovators are what most of our new graduates comprise of. They start with buzzwords like Web 2.0, cloud computing and believe that legacy practices are obsolete and that the senior folks are not creative at all. They drive their projects for learning, ignoring the ground realities they neglect the cost and risk of change and avoid exploiting legacies: patterns and practices. Since they believe that they make things better than they are, it’s possible if you see them writing their own DB connection pooling in technologies having built-in connection pooling or writing their own classes from scratch instead of extending the existing one. They often try to make simple things state-of-the-art and having insufficient knowledge and experience they get lost in the middle. The term coined here is “Silver Bullet” as Steve McConnell says.
3. Engineering Mindset: the most needful
The moderate mindset - or engineering mindset as I say- tends to utilize and exploit the experience, invested by the lots of great minds avoiding useless reinventions but never shy to address the issues with in the particular scenario, if it doesn’t fit with. The mindset says that understand your objective whether it’s build-to-learn or learn-to-build. It says that to be honest and successful, an engineer shouldn’t behave like a scientist who build and destroy just for learning. And it says that there’s always room for improvement since it’s a going concern but it’s not the ultimate goal of an engineer instead it’s to deliver the most optimal and economical.
A single practice may have different out comes when followed with or without reason. So, if a practice is being followed by majority, most probably there are reasons, try to find them, dont’ shy asking other followers if you couldn’t, but if nobody else knows, you have at least one reason to avoid it. Better to have your own with reasons instead of following blindly.
Being an engineer, I do not believe that I am right all the way, considering that I’ve limited amount of skills, knowledge, experience. Your comments and disagreements will be anticipated hoping they’ll help us having a balanced mindset.
By: Catalyst
About the Author:
1. The Fundamentalist Craftsmen or Blind Followers
There are people who have strong belief in old practices. They always have the same number of documents, same life-cycle, identical design, and unbelievably a single strategy for every project. The most surprising point for me is that even the failure is unable to make them believe that there’s something wrong. Instead of trying to make some improvements and searching for the shortcoming in their practices and strategy, they start believing that failure is a norm, or it’s not failure at all. For instance, you’ll hear them saying “Clients never get satisfied” or “Losing deadlines is a norm in our industry”.
Examples -make things easier
In a software project, the offshore back-office development team shares the documents reside in their local repository with the the on-site front-office team to let them update the documents. In absence of their access on offline documents the local team shares the documents via email with the remote team. Obviously they get frequent version conflicts in documents and when it happens, they arrange a meeting and manually resolve the conflicts in the documents. For months, they suffer with this problem but avoid change in their practice e.g. having an online document repository instead of shareing the documents on email. The term coined here is Brute Force approach as Steve McConnell called it
2. The Innovator – or scientist, we can say
Away from the above category, the innovators are what most of our new graduates comprise of. They start with buzzwords like Web 2.0, cloud computing and believe that legacy practices are obsolete and that the senior folks are not creative at all. They drive their projects for learning, ignoring the ground realities they neglect the cost and risk of change and avoid exploiting legacies: patterns and practices. Since they believe that they make things better than they are, it’s possible if you see them writing their own DB connection pooling in technologies having built-in connection pooling or writing their own classes from scratch instead of extending the existing one. They often try to make simple things state-of-the-art and having insufficient knowledge and experience they get lost in the middle. The term coined here is “Silver Bullet” as Steve McConnell says.
3. Engineering Mindset: the most needful
The moderate mindset - or engineering mindset as I say- tends to utilize and exploit the experience, invested by the lots of great minds avoiding useless reinventions but never shy to address the issues with in the particular scenario, if it doesn’t fit with. The mindset says that understand your objective whether it’s build-to-learn or learn-to-build. It says that to be honest and successful, an engineer shouldn’t behave like a scientist who build and destroy just for learning. And it says that there’s always room for improvement since it’s a going concern but it’s not the ultimate goal of an engineer instead it’s to deliver the most optimal and economical.
A single practice may have different out comes when followed with or without reason. So, if a practice is being followed by majority, most probably there are reasons, try to find them, dont’ shy asking other followers if you couldn’t, but if nobody else knows, you have at least one reason to avoid it. Better to have your own with reasons instead of following blindly.
Being an engineer, I do not believe that I am right all the way, considering that I’ve limited amount of skills, knowledge, experience. Your comments and disagreements will be anticipated hoping they’ll help us having a balanced mindset.
By: Catalyst
About the Author:
Ahmed is a Senior Software Engineer / Tech. Lead at Avanza Solutions. He has eight years of experience in software engineering profession.
Grants For New Innovations And Inventions
November 7, 2009 by admin
Filed under Personal Finance
Ability of any firm to realize the value of new, and assimilate it to its existing propositions to meet commercial ends reflects to its customers its innovative capabilities. Innovations and inventions in economic, social, political or in any field of activity, which promise to increase the productivity and contribute towards the development have always been appreciated and encouraged by the government of America.
This is the world of change and only with the change can there be a possibility of further growth and prosperity. Whether any firm, individual, or any group or any section of society has any idea or proposal for any new invention or innovation in their existing work process is always regarded in high esteem and is entitled to apply for grant from the government.
Different departments of government have special provisions to provide grants for those who are willing to show their innovative, scientific and creative spree that would create an everlasting impact on the generations to come and would emerge as the most useful product for the whole humanity for e.g. U.S. Department of Energy I&I supports with grants to all small businessmen who promise to adopt in their work area energy saving concepts and technologies. Those technological devices, inventories and machines using very limited energy are entitled for the Grant of I&I.
Aspiring businesses have to be always alert on funding schemes being announced by I&I twice a year. This announcement is awakening call for the businessmen to immediately avail of this opportunity by registering themselves with the Interactive Procurement System (IIPS) and then later submit their prepared proposal.
Only those proposals which respond themselves to the open announcement will be accepted by I&I. Hereby only those proposals which meet criteria of the government announced scheme and appear to be more productive and conducive than the others would be granted this privilege.
In the same way, the National Institute of Standards and Technology also fund the program called Advanced Technology Program ATP to motivate businessmen for investing the money, time and their energy for the high-risk technology development, which in turn can be utilized for increasing productivity and product development.
There is also Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR) regulated and administered by the Office of Technology at SBA with an intention to give boost to the start up firms or companies for bringing in technological innovations in their produced products and services. Non-profit research institutions can also be a part of the grant program by becoming an aspiring applicant for the same.
Grants not just solve the funding problem but also become a source of inspiration for the people to give their ideas and valuable propositions a good sense of deliverance, a good taste and are further able to appease the appetite of the masses.
By: John Goldman
About the Author:
This is the world of change and only with the change can there be a possibility of further growth and prosperity. Whether any firm, individual, or any group or any section of society has any idea or proposal for any new invention or innovation in their existing work process is always regarded in high esteem and is entitled to apply for grant from the government.
Different departments of government have special provisions to provide grants for those who are willing to show their innovative, scientific and creative spree that would create an everlasting impact on the generations to come and would emerge as the most useful product for the whole humanity for e.g. U.S. Department of Energy I&I supports with grants to all small businessmen who promise to adopt in their work area energy saving concepts and technologies. Those technological devices, inventories and machines using very limited energy are entitled for the Grant of I&I.
Aspiring businesses have to be always alert on funding schemes being announced by I&I twice a year. This announcement is awakening call for the businessmen to immediately avail of this opportunity by registering themselves with the Interactive Procurement System (IIPS) and then later submit their prepared proposal.
Only those proposals which respond themselves to the open announcement will be accepted by I&I. Hereby only those proposals which meet criteria of the government announced scheme and appear to be more productive and conducive than the others would be granted this privilege.
In the same way, the National Institute of Standards and Technology also fund the program called Advanced Technology Program ATP to motivate businessmen for investing the money, time and their energy for the high-risk technology development, which in turn can be utilized for increasing productivity and product development.
There is also Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR) regulated and administered by the Office of Technology at SBA with an intention to give boost to the start up firms or companies for bringing in technological innovations in their produced products and services. Non-profit research institutions can also be a part of the grant program by becoming an aspiring applicant for the same.
Grants not just solve the funding problem but also become a source of inspiration for the people to give their ideas and valuable propositions a good sense of deliverance, a good taste and are further able to appease the appetite of the masses.
By: John Goldman
About the Author:
John Goldman is one of the foremost advisors in matters relating to Government Grants and Financial Aid. To learn more about government grants and how to apply for them visit the Government Grant USA website
